Archive for February, 2005

Tonight I had to do a drive to Jersey, and I was in the mood for some driving music. Unfortunately, all of my CDs are currently sitting my office, so I had to flip through the paltry radio offerings of South Jersey. Flip, flip, flip. Billy Joel. Flip, flip, flip. Corelli on WQXR. Flip, flip, flip. Some unidentifiable “new” music on Top 40.

Sometimes I think the blogging evangelists just get a little overhyped about how blogging is going to change the world or at least change the way that marketing works. You know, how markets are conversations.

However, I must admit that seeing referrers from major ad agencies makes me feel a little influential. Just a tad.

I had one of those “I feel like an utter loser” moments today. My daughter has been sick for the past few days with a low but persistent fever, stomach upset, her throat hurting her. I didn’t think much of it when I first discovered she was sick, but by last night I knew that I should make an appointment for her at the pediatrician’s. So, this morning, she isn’t feeling too hot, and I make the appointment.

After I make the appointment, I helped her get dressed and I see that she has a prickly heat looking like rash. What the heck?

At the pediatrician, the nurse is dutifully examining her and I mention the rash. The nurse takes one look at the rash and tells me “Yep, it sure looks like strep throat. We’ll have to take a culture, but I’m sure it’s strep.” It turns out it was strep. I had no clue. I never had it as a kid.

Liked: I liked the iTunes ones and the “I work with a bunch of monkeys” one. Robbery. NFL players singing tomorrow. Soldiers coming home (tugging on the heartstrings, I still don’t like watery beer). Clouding up the car windows. Cooking the cat. Working with a bunch of monkeys II. The nuts with the fairy tale characters. Working with a bunch of monkeys III.

Most likely to use the product they’re advertising: I work with a bunch of monkeys (careerbuilder). iTunes/Pepsi. Napster. Prius (ok, the commercial was cool.)

Lame commercials of the night: The Cadillac in the tunnel one. The countertop one. Frozen guy in a car (all three times of it is lame). Talking Baby. Tobasco. The easy button - seen that already, lame-o. Drug for can’t getting it up syndrome - even showing a couple in two seperate bathtubs. Verizon wireless miniaturization.

Ok: Bud light jumping out of an airplane. The guys on the picture phone. Budweiser Clydesdale wanna bes. The bold and smooth one. Pepsi truck.

Didn’t make an impression on me: The movie commercials. The rest of the car commercials. mbna. Comcast.

Yahoo research just released a beta of a new contextual search technology they call Y!Q. The basic idea behind it is that you, the Web reader, can click on words or phrases on a Web page and open up a contextual window with results from Yahoo. Here’s the Yahoo Search blog entry about the conception of the idea.

So, tell me again why I would want to include Y!Q tags, just so I can make my page size larger (with javascript at that) and then lead people off of my page with results from Yahoo?

My call on it is that it’s a technically interesting idea, the execution needs much more (like, say, standards) but I don’t see real world applications for a professional Web master. Link farms, on the other hand, will probably benefit..

Simply put, using an open proxy is like opening the door (connecting to a computer on the Net) to an unlocked (proxy service was up and running) house and then arguing that you could use the house (proxy service) because the door was unlocked (computer user didn’t disable the service).

So Sam, like other link spammers, uses the thousands of ‘open proxies’ on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they’re actually hard to lock down completely.

So, people like Sam are using computers that they didn’t get explicit permission to use. Normal people tend to call that tresspass [to chattels].